Kick Me (20 page)

Even Dan came by to give me his blessing. “That’s great that you’re taking Cathy to the Christmas Dance. She’s really happy about it.”

It was a relief that he was taking this so well, but it also made me feel like a dork. The subtext of his words seemed to be “I’m glad Cathy’s going with a guy who’s such a nerd that I know nothing other than dancing will happen between them.” I resented the imagined implication. As far as I was concerned, Cathy and I were going to spend a very romantic evening of slow-dancing, groping, and making out. An epic romance was about to blossom, and I knew I was mere days away from my new life as a guy who was very comfortable engaging in public displays of affection with a tall, pretty high-school girl.

The evening of the dance, my mother dropped me off at Cathy’s house. The plan was for Cathy and me to drive to the dance with her friend Sandy and Sandy’s boyfriend, Walter. Walter was seventeen and had a driver’s license. I was a bit nervous about double-dating with a guy who was two years older than me. Since I was such an inexperienced dater, I didn’t want my embarrassment to be compounded by some guy who “knew the ropes” watching me and judging my every move. But, realizing that being driven to the dance by a seventeen-year-old was far less painful than being driven by my fifty-five-year-old mother, I gave in.

“Have a great time at the dance,” my mom said as I stepped out of the car, replete with a wide-lapeled velour jacket with my large shirt collar worn on the outside. I looked down, admiring my tight-fitting Angel’s Flight slacks and black platform shoes. I look just like the guys on
Soul Train,
I thought to myself. My hand came up to check that my puka shell necklace, bought not in Hawaii but at Silverman’s disco clothing store down at the local mall, was properly in place. I was ready for action.

“You look so cute,” my mom called out from the car.

“Mom,”
I said in a whiny tone, turning the monosyllabic word into two syllables. Her use of the word
cute
had been a bone of contention between the two of us for the last few years, and she knew what I really wanted her to say.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You look
’cool,’
” she said in a mocking tone that foretold the fact that she would call me “cute” and not “cool” yet another day.

And with that, she took off down the road as we had agreed, so that neither Cathy nor her family would see that I had been driven over by my mother. I walked up to the front door of her house and rang the bell. My heart was beating quite fast. I had been imagining what this evening would be like, but now that I was staring down its cocked and loaded barrel, my nerves were really kicking in. However, everything was about to start happening more quickly than I was prepared for.

Her father answered the door. He was a normal-looking man with a mustache, a dad like most dads in the Midwest, the kind of guy you could easily imagine being in a bowling league and enjoying the wide-eyed exploits of Dondi on the funnies page.

“Well, you must be Paul,” he said in a casual tone that showed he had greeted Cathy’s dates several times before.

“Yes, sir. It’s nice to meet you.”

“C’mon in. Cathy’s almost ready.”

I entered their house. Cathy’s mom was at the top of the stairs, gazing down with a look that said she was trying to control her giddiness about something.

“Cathy’s almost ready,” she said, not knowing that her husband had just uttered the exact same three words to me seconds earlier. Cathy’s father gestured for me to sit on the couch. I complied.

“So,” he said, sitting down heavily in his armchair, “I see they don’t make you wear ties to the Christmas Dance, huh?”

The thought of wearing a tie to a dance in 1977 was as foreign as wearing pegged pants. “Oh, they only make you wear a tie to the prom, I think.”

“Wow, that’s pretty nice. What I wouldn’t give to not have to wear a tie to work. You know, you’re lucky you don’t go to a Catholic school. They make you wear ties with those uniforms.” He shook his head, his eyes getting the look of a man whose mind was going back to unpleasant times. “They made me wear a tie to school for years. Man, did I hate that.”

It’s always weird talking to someone else’s parents because you realize how different your life could have been if you had come out of a different womb. I’m sure Cathy and her family had heard her dad get spooky over his lifelong battle with neckwear many times, but for me, a guy whose only goal was to French-kiss his daughter, the man was starting to creep me out. But I forced myself to look at him sympathetically, just in case Cathy and I fell madly in love and he was destined to become my father-in-law.

“Huh, that’s too bad,” I said, trying to sound empathetic. “That must have gotten hot in the summer.”

“Oh, Christ. Don’t get me started on summer school.”

Fortunately for me, Cathy’s mom came down the stairs and saved me from having to journey any further into her husband’s dysfunctional past. “She’s
read-y,
” her mom said in a singsongy voice that announced she had probably spent most of the afternoon helping Cathy prepare herself for this big evening.

I looked up at the top of the stairs. Her bedroom door was shut. There was definitely something exciting about the whole thing, as if I were on
Let’s Make a Deal
and was about to find out if I’d picked the door with the new car behind it. Knowing how pretty Cathy was in school every day, my heart raced at the thought of how beautiful she was going to look after half a day of preparation.

The door opened. Cathy stepped out slowly with a shy look on her face, a look I had seen on the faces of brides in so many Westerns, when the innocent farm girl is first revealed in her wedding dress to her intended. In those movies, the cowboy always slowly takes off his hat in reverence to her unexpected beauty and whistles to himself, amazed. I stared up at her. Cathy looked down over the railing and gave me a coy little smile. Her expression bore the words
So . . . what do you think?

So . . . what did I think?

Zonk, as Monty Hall would say.

She was terrifying. Whatever she and her mom had been up to all afternoon should not have occurred. Cathy’s normally soft Dorothy Hamill hair had been sprayed up into a shape that is best described as a Nazi storm-trooper helmet. It hovered up and away from the edges of her scalp like a flying saucer, defying both gravity and attractiveness. Her face had been made up like a ventriloquist dummy’s, with bright red cheeks and thick blue eye shadow that said less “I’m your dream girl” and more “I just got punched out in a bar fight.” She was wearing an ill-advised dress that was very silk-esque and clingy, which instead of being enticing simply drew attention to the fact that Cathy had the slightest bit of a gut on her. I had only ever seen her wearing tight jeans in school and suddenly realized the girdlelike qualities of tightly packed denim. The tops of her arms, which had never before been exposed to me, were now on display and revealed an overabundance of moles. She wore white pumps with a noncommittal heel that looked exactly like the shoes nurses used to wear in hospital shows from the 1960s. And topping off her ensemble was a loosely knit white shawl draped around her shoulders—the exact same shawl I’d seen my eighty-something grandmother wear for years.

If ever one could hear the sound of a libido dropping, the thud of mine must have been deafening.

“Wow, Cathy,” I said, forcing myself to sound like husbands I’d heard on TV shows. “You look great.”

Cathy gave me a shy smile and descended the stairs. Her mother led her over and delivered her to me as if we were at the wedding altar while her father took pictures of us. As we stood together posing, clouds of Love’s Baby Soft wafted off of Cathy and assaulted my nose like the green fingers of the plague that killed the firstborn males of Egypt in
The Ten Commandments.
Cathy kept giving me sweet, coy looks that I knew were supposed to be romantic. However, they only succeeded in unnerving me. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this dating thing, I thought. Because looking at Cathy right then, the last thing I wanted to do was make out with her.

The doorbell rang and Cathy’s friend Sandy came in with her boyfriend, Walter. Cathy’s parents knew Sandy quite well and so there were big greetings all around. They had also apparently met Walter several times and liked the guy, and so the air was suddenly filled with familiarity that threw me into the outsider role of standing off to the side and smiling as I forced myself to enjoy the warm scene in front of me. Once additional pictures had been taken with the four of us being placed into every conceivable combination, we headed out the door and climbed into Walter’s car. We all waved good-bye to Cathy’s parents and headed off. It was such a
Leave It to Beaver
moment that I was completely unprepared for what was to follow.

The second Cathy’s house was out of range, Sandy reached under the driver’s seat and pulled out a can of beer.

“Who wants a brew?” she asked with a big, evil smile.

“Allllll-riiiiiiiight!” Cathy said in the same cadence that Jimmie “J.J.” Walker from
Good Times
used to say his catch phrase of “Dy-No-Mite.”

Sandy cracked open the beer and took a small sip. She handed it off to Walter, who took a slightly bigger sip. Walter then handed the can over his shoulder to Cathy. Cathy took the beer, raised it to her lips, and chugged down the entire can. I watched in amazement as she drank, pulling the beer so hard that trickles of it leaked out of the sides of her mouth and ran down her jawbone as if she were in a Mountain Dew commercial. She took the empty can away from her mouth, gave an “oops, did I do that?” look, and then burped. Sandy cracked up, Walter cracked up, and I pretended to crack up even though I was completely and utterly horrified. At this point in my life, I had only tasted beer once and that was at a friend’s house when we were twelve and retrieving a beer for his lawn-cutting father. I had taken a small sip and thought it tasted much like I imagined beef-flavored apple juice that had gone bad might taste.

“Wow, you must have really been thirsty,” I said, trying to sound unaffected.

“I just wanted to get loose,” Cathy said to Sandy.

What did that mean? Was she nervous? Uptight? Was there something about her date with me that she had been dreading? I was immediately insulted and I think my face gave me away. Cathy saw this and quickly explained herself.

“I mean, these dances can be so boring and I thought we should get ourselves more in the party mood.” She gave me a smile and called up to Sandy in the front seat. “You got another one for Paul?”

“Yeah, right here,” said Sandy, reaching under her seat.

“Oh, that’s okay,” I said, trying not to sound panicked. “I’ll wait until later.” Scenes from all those ABC
Afterschool Specials
about the evils of teenage drinking flooded my brain. I had just seen the TV movie
Sarah T.—Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic
and was now scared that by the end of the evening, I, like Sarah T., would be getting drunk and killing a horse by riding it into traffic.

“Well, if you don’t want it, I’ll have it,” said Cathy, who grabbed the can and cracked it open like a Shriner. She drank half of it, burped again, handed it back up to Sandy, and then turned to me, excited. “We’re gonna have so much
fun
tonight!”

I forced a smile back. I was beginning to sweat in my velour jacket.

When we got to the school, the Commodores’ “Brick House” was booming out of the cafetorium doors. Officially ready to party the night away, thanks to one and a half cans of Stroh’s beer, Cathy grabbed my hand and pulled me out onto the dance floor. She immediately started dancing wildly, jumping and gyrating as if she were a featured dancer on
American Bandstand.
She was scanning the room as she danced, looking for friends and checking to see if Dan had come with anyone. I looked around and was thrown by the sight of everyone from my school dressed in their finest evening wear. You get so used to seeing your peers dressed like your peers that it’s always surprising when they show up somewhere dressed like your parents.

“Hey, Cathy, what’s goin’ on?” yelled over one of her other friends. The girl, who was wearing a form-fitting Danskin leotard dress as if she were a cast member of
A Chorus Line,
made a face at Cathy whose meaning I could only decipher as “Who’s the dork you’re with?” Cathy made a big smiley face back at the girl that seemed to convey both “Shut up” and “I know, can you believe it?” The two girls laughed to each other across the dance floor, then Cathy turned back to me and gave me what I think was supposed to be a sexy look. Having never been the recipient of a sexy look in my fifteen years on earth, I had no idea how to interpret it. But it felt like something that was supposed to throw me off the scent of the exchange she knew I must have just witnessed. I wasn’t sure how to take any of this because, being a newcomer to the dating scene, I had no idea if this was about me or just the kind of thing girls did with each other on dates. Girls always seemed to be laughing about something whenever they were with their friends, and I had been paranoid for years that every time they laughed, somehow they were laughing at me. I forced a smile back at her, and Cathy then started dancing even more wildly, whipping her head from side to side. I became hypnotized by the fact that her rock-hard flying-saucer-shaped hairdo was completely immune to the centrifugal force her actions were exerting upon it. You could have hit that hair with a wrecking ball and not made a dent in it.

As the song started to wind down, I noticed that Cathy’s dancing seemed to lose its initial intensity. She was still gyrating in a sort of belly-dancer-meets-drunk-guy-at-the-accounting-department-Christmas-party way, but her face showed she was becoming preoccupied. By the time the song faded, she threw me a look and said, “I’ll be right back.” And with this, she walked very quickly out of the cafetorium.

Twenty minutes later, I was standing on the side of the dance floor talking to my friend Tom, whose date was off talking with some of her friends.